Give the gift of dependency clarity

CPANfile - 2013-12-10

Oh no! This gist does what I need, but it won't run!

How many times have you turned to your favorite search engine and found a code snippet that implements a solution to a problem, but it's not at all clear what dependencies are embedded in the code snippet?

Now this Advent, you can give the gift of clear dependencies to your users.

Introducing CPANfile

A few years ago Tatsuhiko Miyagawa wrote a specification for perl projects based on the Ruby gemfile format. This specification is called CPANfile and it is not as well known as it ought to be.

Why CPANfile is super cool

Makes dependency requirements explicit

Using a tool like carton you can quickly and easily "freeze" the module dependencies for your project into a local folder, and then push the frozen deps along with the application code to your version control system and somewhere else checkout the same repo with the necessary dependencies already bundled in.

This is very useful in an environment where you want to pin some dependencies indefinitely — or if you want some environments (dev) where you have more control over dependencies to use one set of modules and another (prod) to use whatever's already agreed upon for that environment.

Makes experimenting with perl code from GitHub easy

Recent versions of cpanm support parsing and installing the dependencies given in a CPANfile format. That makes cloning the code found in a gist and installing its dependencies a snap, instead of guessing at a dependency chain.

Sometimes code isn't worth the time to "CPAN-ize"

If you've written some scripts to help you get stuff done, and they're somewhat specific to your task at hand, it might not be worth the time effort to write tests, good docs or package something for release to CPAN.

In those situations, you should still share the code (it will eventually get indexed by some search engine) but you can include a CPANfile to make some future user (maybe even yourself) completely understand the dependencies for a given project.

Yeah, but isn't it hard?

Not at all. If you're used to writing MakeMaker-style build scripts, learning CPANfile is a snap. Here's a sample CPANfile from a recent code project I did which converted WordPress style XML exports into Markdown formatted flatfiles. It's called wp2md.

Notice the only specific version that's called out is the version of perl itself. Since I didn't use any explicit operators, these all mean the same as if you'd put them into MakeMaker as a 0 version dependency — which is to say, the latest version available unless you have a version installed locally.